DASH completion

Response

We are not able to confirm whether Avon and Somerset Police holds the information you have requested. On this occasion the cost of determining whether we hold the information would exceed the limit set by the Freedom of Information Act.  As a result, your request is refused under Section 12 of the Act.   

At this time the limit is set at £450 or 18 staff hours work. This represents the estimated cost of one person spending 2.5 working days in determining whether the department holds the information, locating, retrieving and extracting it. 

Our Professional Standards Department (PSD) do not currently have a specific category that captures complaint or conduct matters related to DASH referrals. Consequently, each complaint and conduct allegation summary recorded in the specified timeframe would need to be manually reviewed to determine whether any relevant information is held. For cases recorded prior to April 2020, further review would be required to identify cases relating specifically to police officers. Between 1 January 2013 and 25 June 2025, PSD recorded: 

• 20,271 complaint cases  

• 1,791 conduct cases  

• Total: 22,062 cases  

At an estimated 20 minutes per case, this would require approximately 7,354 hours to review, which significantly exceeds the 18-hour time limit.  

This letter represents a Refusal Notice under the Act. 

If you would like to refine your request in order to bring it down to a more manageable level, we may be able to establish whether relevant information is held, and if so provide it subject to any exemptions. For example, we would be able to undertake a text search for complaint and conduct cases recorded since April 2020 involving police officers, where the allegation summary includes the text ‘DASH’. Depending on the number of results, we would then be able to review these to ascertain whether they related to the falsification of or failure to complete a DASH. This method would not be adequate to respond to your request as currently formulated, due to the limitations of text searches: cases which may in fact be relevant would be excluded from the results if the specific search term did not feature in the allegation summary.  

Please let us know if you would like us to consider a refined request for the information described above.